Mass shootings

[Belsnickel]

(02-23-2018, 11:14 AM)WychesWarrior Wrote: Echoing some sentiments already stated here....this thread definitely HAS been enlightening.  Not only from an educational standpoint, but also noteworthy is that I find that most of us are really rather close in our beliefs about gun control....if you honestly stand back and look at it, removing partisan rhetoric (which is the MAIN problem in my opinion, but I digress....)  What I'm about to delve into, honestly has nothing to do with school shootings.  It's more about gun violence in general.

Having said that, I wanted to throw out something that came to me as I watched "Hate thy Neighbor" last night.  I'm wondering what some of your thoughts are about my casual observation.  As I watched the show, with all of the different cultures and viewpoints clashing, many of the participants armed, I thought about this thread.  What mainly came to mind was the alluding to Swiss and Australian gun laws and the violence statistics associated with them.  It occurred to me that maybe a part of all of this was the huge differences in their societies and ours.  So I looked up some numbers.  When you think of America, you think of the large "melting pot".  A whole bunch of different views, cultures, traditions, ethnicities, and sub-societies....if you will....trying to assimilate into one homologous society.  There's always going to be some clashes, it's just human nature.

What I found was what I thought I would find, albeit not as lopsided as it ultimately wound up being.  There's a rather large discrepancy in the population demographics between the two and us.  Australia is 90% white, 3% Aboriginal, and 7% Asian.  Switzerland is 94% white, and the remaining 6% was listed as "other".   Here, we are 72.4% white, African-Americans 12.6%, Hispanics 16.3%, Asian 4.8%, etc....from the 2010 census.  Here, we also have a rather large gang problem, while Australia is mainly biker gangs, and there was very little info on Swiss gang activity.  So, with all of these numbers taken into consideration, is it possible that having an overwhelming percentage of the population being able to readily identify with each other, versus a litany of backgrounds in another population has a bearing in any of this?  In other words.....maybe they have more in common with each other, so there's less of a chance of vehement opposition in viewpoints that could wind being a violent confrontation.  Do they even have "hate crimes" in these countries? Something to ponder, or no?

Of course, maybe their media and politicians don't fan the flames of division to push an agenda and get votes.

I don't think it is just a racial or ethnic breakdown. I think a lot of it has to do with an overall cultural difference that exists within our country. Now, Australia isn't tiny, but their population is more condensed on the coasts than ours is. We are a very widespread population with many different cultural identities, even within racial and ethnic demographics. This isn't to say that other countries don't have this, as well. I look to Germany for an example, because there is a sizable cultural difference between someone in Schlesswig-Holstein and someone in Bayern, and even within those states. So there is cultural diversity in other countries, but when you compound that with our country being relatively young, with our size, with our two-party system, it makes it interesting. Adding to that you have the fact that the American cultural identity itself doesn't exist as we like to pretend it does. We are a country which is made up almost entirely by descendants of immigrants that for many generations stuck to their own communities as much as possible.

I don't have a ton of time this morning, or I could go on and on about this. You're right, it is our diversity that makes this difficult to really nail down, but it is because of so many factors it could make your head spin. When I look at policy solutions, these are things we actually have to take into account. I would love it if I could look at policy in a quantitative way only and that would work. But that's not our system, that's not our society, that's not our cultures. We have to take into account all of these different things when we look at how policy will be perceived. For a city it's one thing, for a state it's another. Doing it at the federal level? No thank you. I don't want that job.